Grieving West Memphis chief raises national curtain on sovereign citizens

Arkansas: West Memphis police chief Bob Paudert tells a Nashville convention of law officers about the sovereign citizen movement. Sovereign citizen Joseph Kane, 16, gunned down two police officers in West Memphis in May, 2010, including Paudert's son, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, and officer Bill Evans. Kane and his father Jerry Kane, seen in a police video behind Paudert, got in a subsequent shootout with police that left two more officers wounded in the West Memphis WalMart parking lot. (Mark Weber/The Commercial Appeal)

Paudert is traveling around the nation telling law enforcement about the dangers of sovereign citizens who took the life of his son, Brandon (left).

Paudert family photo

Bob Paudert struggles to hold back tears while watching the police car video of his slain son, Sgt. Brandon Paudert, and officer Bill Evans. Both were killed by members of the sovereign citizen movement at a traffic stop last May.

He's known many in the room for years -- former colleagues on police forces, old friends, familiar faces.

But there are no thoughts of reminiscing. It's a somber, lump-in-the-throat moment when West Memphis Police Chief Bob Paudert stands before nearly 200 Tennessee police chiefs in Nashville.

Paudert, a sturdy, 66-year-old, silver-haired career lawman is a stone-faced, grief-stricken evangelist these days. He's on a national crusade to ensure other police chiefs and, in his case, fathers don't experience his horror.

His warning: A growing, national community of anti-government zealots known as sovereign citizens is posing unthinkable danger for law enforcement.

Two veteran officers on Paudert's West Memphis police force -- one his 39-year-old son -- were gunned down last year by a pair of self-professed sovereign citizens during a traffic stop along Interstate 40.

Ohioans Jerry Kane and his AK-47-wielding, 16-year-old son, Joe, were later killed by officers in a gun battle captured on live television.

As he speaks to the rapt group of Tennessee officers, Paudert projects graphic photos of the two dead assailants onto a giant screen.

He refers to them as "scum" or "vomit." No description seems too vile.

It took more than a month before Paudert could watch the tragic scene captured by a police car's dashboard camera -- Jerry Kane arguing with officers over a strange set of legal papers he tendered instead of a driver's license. Then Joe Kane firing the assault rifle that killed both lawmen.

As a father, Paudert didn't want to watch the last seconds of his son's life. As police chief, he needed to know what happened, to see if his officers did anything to put their lives in jeopardy. When he finally watched, he realized they never had a chance; there was nothing routine about this traffic stop.

"They didn't know what they were dealing with," Paudert said. "No one in the department had heard of sovereign citizens until that day."

Today, it's a group of lawmen in Nashville. But it's the same visceral scene, over and over, as Paudert crisscrosses the country on his campaign to give domestic terrorism the profile he believes it deserves. He's been to Montgomery, Ala., Frankfort, Ky., and Glynco, Ga. He's been invited to speak in San Mateo, Calif., and Lake Tahoe, Nev.

At each stop, he plays a piece of the dash-cam video of the traffic stop where his son, Brandon, and officer Bill Evans hadn't suspected a problem.

Bumper stickers, fake driver's licenses, documents written in gibberish flash on the screen -- signs of sovereign citizens. Officers are told to devise a plan for their departments to deal with them.

Paudert knows the message is more powerful if it's delivered by someone who's suffered a loss. It also means every time he speaks, he watches his eldest son die.

As if this were a funeral visitation, the police chiefs line up to offer their condolences. They hug Paudert. They can't imagine it, they say.

* * *

It has been nearly a year since what was likely the bloodiest day in Memphis-area law enforcement history, one that left two officers dead and two others, then-Crittenden County Sheriff Dick Busby and Chief Enforcement Officer W.A. Wren, wounded before the Kanes were killed.

For Paudert, what came rushing in with the grief was the horror of discovering the deaths might have been prevented had officers known the group was quickly and quietly growing outside the view of most Americans.

"It changed the calculus in a sense that many, many more people came to understand that there was this movement with incredibly bizarre beliefs and also that it was a movement that can pose mortal dangers," said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, an organization that tracks extremist groups and produced and distributed Paudert's training video.

"The movement had been growing very, very rapidly up to that moment. And it's not surprising that people essentially didn't know about it. I mean it's a strange netherworld that exists in hotel meeting rooms, in people's homes and in militia encampments.

"So it's not surprising that it's very much under the radar until it explodes like it did in West Memphis on May 20."

The sovereign citizen movement began in the 1970s with a group called Posse Comitatus. Though the group dissolved by the end of the 1980s, it gave birth to a movement.

Sovereign citizens number more than those in the militia movement, and its members engage in more criminal activity, according to a recent Anti-Defamation League report.

But sovereign citizens -- who sometimes call themselves "freemen" or "constitutionalists" -- are less known because their beliefs are complicated, sometimes bizarre.

A flagging economy, the foreclosure crisis and a shift in America's demographics are factors that have fueled recent interest in the movement.

The most basic belief -- that adherents aren't under the jurisdiction of any federal or local law or regulation because those are part of an illegitimate government that slowly replaced the original, legitimate one -- attracts scam artists and believers alike. One estimate puts their numbers as high as 300,000 in the U.S.

The sovereign citizen movement provides desperate people with someone to blame and supposed solutions to their problems, said Mark Pitcavage, director of investigative research at the ADL.

Though the movement was traditionally comprised of white citizens, there are Native Americans, Hispanics and Asians who subscribe to the beliefs as well. The ideas are spreading most rapidly in the black nationalist movement, Potok said. Members, who sometimes call themselves Moors, adhere to the main anti-government, anti-tax theories but often add others.

From January 2010 through February 2011, roughly 165forms were filed with the Shelby County Register that either declare a person a sovereign citizen or use language indicative of sovereign ideology, according to an examination by The Commercial Appeal. Many are Moors.

Shelby County Sheriff Bill Oldham said his office has received letters and notarized documents from local sovereign citizens who believe they are exempt from the law.

"We'll respond to them in writing -- because they'll send it to us many times certified mail -- and let them know that what we received ... does not make them immune to the Constitution, laws of our country or the state of Tennessee or Shelby County," he said.

The newspaper contacted several Shelby County sovereign citizens, but most declined to be interviewed.

One man, who answered a phone number associated with the International Society of Indigenous Sovereigns in paperwork, called himself Chief Skyhawk.

The Indigenous Society is neither anti-government nor violent, he said, but he could not speak for other groups. It's about knowing who you are, he explained. They are not the same people who have recently received media attention.

"I just want you to be honest," he said. "... All we are concerned about is our nationality and our birthright. We're not out here trying to defraud the tax system or the IRS or anything like that. We're not out here stealing houses. We're not out here doing anything that the other groups are alleged to have been doing.

"The only thing that we are doing is being the Native American Indians we are and that we have always been since the beginning."

Pitcavage described the sovereign citizen movement as odd and scary.

"They have all these crazy ideas and beliefs that are just patently absurd. ... And yet at the same time they can be vicious, cold-blooded killers who can gun someone down just because they pulled them over for speeding."

* * *

Police agencies from California to South Carolina have reported increased encounters with sovereign citizens. In 2010, a Florida man was accused of shooting at a state trooper during a traffic stop. Last month, five people were arrested in Alaska for allegedly conspiring to kill several Alaska state troopers and a federal judge.

Incidents involving sovereign citizens have occurred in at least 31 states and have included everything from violent outbursts to bogus insurance schemes.

"It's always the same situation like you saw in the dash-cam video," Potok said. "Brandon Paudert looking at this paper going, 'What the hell is this?' So that's come up again and again and again.

"Right now, collectively, we're in a little different position. At least some law enforcement out there have heard about this before they actually encounter it."

The paperwork Kane presented -- riddled with bullet holes and stained by bloody fingerprints after the shootouts -- is maintained as evidence by the West Memphis Police Department.

Sometimes called paper terrorists, sovereign citizens present documents with pseudo-legal language that can distract officers during traffic stops or residence visits. Experts say sovereign citizens file these phony documents to harass or retaliate against public officials, police officers or people they perceive to be enemies.

Jerry Kane and his son ascribed to a conspiracy theory called "redemption." They traveled the country holding seminars for homeowners upside down on their loans. The Kanes told them how to file what they believed to be the right paperwork with the county register's office to eliminate their mortgage balance.

Chris Curry, the sheriff in Shelby County, Ala., said sovereign citizens have subpoenaed police officers and a district attorney to their own courts. They've fabricated license plates and ID cards that identify them as special marshals. One sovereign told Curry that he'd taken out a $2 billion lien on his own son.

"(He) informed me that he was a sovereign citizen, that he was not subject to our laws and rules ... and if we separated him from his son, then I -- I, the sheriff -- owed him the $2 billion. I told him I'd have to write him a bad check."

Pitcavage doesn't anticipate a downturn in interest. The amount of violence in any extremist group tends to be proportional to a combination of size and its level of agitation, he said.

"At the moment right now, the extreme right has considerable size and very considerable agitation," he said. "And so for the foreseeable future there are going to continue to be significant risks to law enforcement."

* * *

When he travels alone, Paudert typically eats by himself then heads back to his hotel room. No sight-seeing. No television. Sometimes he gets on his computer to tweak his video presentation.

Mostly his mind travels to mile marker 275 where his officers died. He feels guilty because, as a police chief, he didn't know about sovereign citizens.

As far back as 2005, the FBI was investigating Jerry Kane. Chief Paudert has seen the report. He suspects there are others.

"The federal government is a one-way street," Paudert said. "They want information, but they don't give it back."

He spoke recently to U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder. He talked about sharing information. Holder promised to look into it. A few weeks later, Paudert received a call that the FBI wanted him in Washington, D.C., to meet with the domestic terrorist director and assistant FBI director.

"I think they are serious about this," Paudert said. "Holder kept his word."

Paudert doesn't know how long he will continue to deliver his speech. It keeps the killings fresh in his mind, but he's not sure that's healthy.